“Cheeky” was the word Aaron Fagan used to describe his choice of title. Atom and Void (2025), Fagan’s fifth collection, published by Princeton University Press, winks at J. Robert Oppenheimer’s series of essays and philosophical lectures exploring quantum theory, postcreation of the atomic bomb. Fagan and Oppenheimer are now press-mates, their collections christened with the same name. They also share an attempt to make sense of history’s long past and long future.
Atom and Void consists of 55 sonnets that echo back and forth to one another. While the entire collection is interlinked, poems sharing a page spread read as mirror images. Each poem, in its own way, attempts to understand the fallacy of clarity, where consciousness exists between the atom and the void. It’s a haunting collection, at times yearning. The voice of the book feels unsettled, which makes sense given the sonnets’ delving into the nature of reality, meaning-making at large, and perception. There is immediacy and meditation in Fagan’s poems, a perspective shift between the myopic and the massive.
The collection is universal in the sense that attempting to understand the illusion of clarity is a ubiquitous (albeit poetic) problem, but Fagan has a curiosity and moodiness that make the poems feel deeply personal—an opportunity to peer into the confines of another’s perception, maybe even psyche. Jung’s influence breathes throughout the poems, specifically in “Everyone a Parsifal,” “Pepper’s Ghost,” and “Anamorphosis.” In “Anamesis:”
To Say there is no explanation for this is not
An understatement, it is the only explanation.
Put another way: I am the only person to never
Have a mystical experience and remain sane.
I have long admired Fagan for his seriousness of thought and pure beauty of his work. And we have long been internet friends, but in spite of that familiarity, sitting down with him to discuss Atom and Void left me feeling excitable, charged, combustible even. This is the power of great poetry and great poets—not necessarily the clarity their work provides, but the solidarity felt in knowing those ambient questions we hold are being asked by the type of people we want asking them.
Katie Ebbitt: I kept wondering if you were an atheist as I read Atom and Void, or if you have a religious perspective. Or was this book a philosophical exercise?
Aaron Fagan: It’s definitely not a philosophical exercise. To put it succinctly, I’ve been sober for 22 years now. In recovery culture, they talk about a higher power of your own understanding or God. I took that charge to heart. So much of my life has been monopolized by culturally received ideas of what God is or would be. I have no patience for any of those. Yet, when you take to heart the idea that it’s a higher power of your own understanding, not a higher power of other people’s understanding, and when I began to investigate again, as placeholders, questions of spirituality, I started opening myself up to actions that were in greater alignment with my own heartfelt intentions, not passively received morality, rather living a life that is actually aligned with how I want to be in the world and how I see being in the world as important. Not something that’s rigidly dogmatic from without, but something that’s rigidly dogmatic from within.
If I want to suffer less in the world, but there are certain nonnegotiables. This is all more or less Buddhism. Old age, sickness, and death are kinds of nonnegotiable forms of suffering. And this control impulse in me, which lots of other people share, is wanting the present moment to be different from the way it is. Whether that’s seeking drugs and alcohol to change the way I feel about living this moment or to try to shed all of my old identities, my old ideas about who I am and how the world is organized and come to the present moment as it’s unfolding in this unwritten way, not narrating everything—to just be present with it as it is unadorned with all of my storytelling. Reality starts to reveal itself in a totally new way, stripped of all that storytelling, and what emerges starts to look like grace. And that’s not to say that all the pain and heartbreak and bewilderment and confusion aren’t still there. You’re able to be with it in a different way.
My interest in spiritual questions has been more like a life-or-death pursuit. It’s not something out of armchair philosophical playing in the sandbox and seeing how ideas go together. I find that anytime my ego or psyche collapses around an idea of God, an idea of spirituality, that’s the moment that I already begin suffering over my conception of whatever it is. I find that it’s that way when I try to define who I am, who God is, what poetry is. Anytime I try to come up with some sort of definition, something that isn’t a living, breathing thing, just merely an iteration of an idea, not a final idea on something, it immediately becomes something to suffer over. Reification, the making of an abstract concept, making it concrete, that to me is how the mind relates to nouns and how the world is organized in these concepts. It will arrive at concrete concepts and judgments about the world with things that are ultimately abstract. I’m more interested in the dynamic, the active, the on-goingness. There is no arrival. All arrivals are departures. To just be constantly washed out to sea by everything. I lived most of my life feeling like everybody has the instruction manual, walking around like they have the answers. I felt like I was supposed to know who I am. And now nothing’s changed. But rather than that being a source of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, et cetera, now it’s like the ultimate wellspring of joy for me: not knowing who I am.
KE: This morning, I was reviewing my notes on Atom and Void. Afterward, I walked through a graveyard. I am constantly asking myself why I am feeling what I am feeling because it’s generally not pleasant. There is so much suffering in this ongoing struggle to locate myself within my own emotions. One of the things within Buddhism that I both love and struggle with is the Wheel of Life and the varying realms that we go through. I find myself too much of a hungry ghost. I am taking fragments from the poem “Parousia,” but you write: “my body is my body of work… /entropy continues to impose fundamental limits/ On communication…/ one molecule in the brain decides a good memory or bad.”
AF: Yeah. Gosh.
KE: I am sorry, it’s not really a question.
AF: I’m appreciating how you’re engaging with it. I’m unapologetically a cafeteria-style person when it comes to spiritual concepts. I go with what works in the actual world as an applied principle. What passes for spiritual practice is a cargo cult. There are these empty procedures and the theater of these things that have become wildly decoupled from their sources and the real meaning, cultural memory, and importance of them. There’s a lot about Buddhism that’s awful; there’s a lot about all organized religion that is awful for all the obvious reasons, but I’m not as prepared as I used to be to throw it all out, because underneath all of that, there is something essential that is valuable to actual living.
At the end of my drinking, I was a danger to myself and other people. I was running the risk of being institutionalized. It dawned on me, by not asking for help from other human beings, I’m a danger to myself and other people, but when I do reach out for help and when I’m of service to other people and I align myself with this loose grouping of moral and spiritual principles, I find that not only am I not a danger to myself and other people, I can be a source of healing in the world. The darkest things of my past turn out to be solid gold in the context of recovery. I can literally help save the lives of other people with the stuff that I was going to take to my grave. I go with what works.
KE: Atom and Void is famously a series of essays by Oppenheimer. These essays are focused on understanding fallacy and how the assumption of understanding can bring about destruction. The Picabia epigraph at the beginning of your book relates to this: “knowledge is an old error remembering its youth.” I didn’t completely understand the meaning at first, which felt so obvious after finishing your Atom and Void.
AF: There is something very riddle-like in its construction.
KE: Was the reference to Oppenheimer intentional?
AF: Yes. That’s my favorite of his books, not that he wrote a lot of books. I had had a different title for the collection, but I had written this poem, Atom and Void. I just found it kind of cheeky that the book had been accepted by Princeton and they’re the ones who published those essays. I had always had this interest in physics and there’s a sort of tortured line of logic that I have about where physics and language interact and a kind of quantum poetics, so to speak, that is just too tedious to even bother uttering out loud. If anybody gleans anything from it, that’s for them to discover, but having elaborate theories of language and poetics, I think can be horribly pretentious. I try not to be that way, but it would be dishonest for me to say that those kinds of things aren’t interesting to me.
You picked up on the heart’s core of what I love about the Oppenheimer collection about the fallacies. In a way it relates to that idea of the cargo cult too, that there are these received understandings of things. It’s hilarious because there’s a phrase in mathematics called not even wrong. It’s a term for pseudoscience, that there are things that get passed off in the culture, so this could be something that’s about history, it could be something about poetry or language. One of the famous examples is the Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken.” There are all these things that live as cultural artifacts, but what people interpret them to mean is literally the opposite of what the poem’s argument is. They are not even wrong because they’re so foundationally incorrect that it doesn’t even dignify being called wrong, the foundations of it are so flawed as to not even be worth entertaining. I think that principle can be applied to a lot of what passes for any number of things particularly in contemporary culture.
KE: Do you want to say what those any number of things are?
AF: It’s all translation, everything is lost in translation. You look at the way poetry and education and language and literature were when I was coming up, we were reading the exact same novels that my parents read when they were in public school. There’s the primacy of the novel, but was that because fiction is a superior art form or is it because trade publishers had relationships with schools? A novel is more paper and more ink and requires more man-hours to edit into something that can be sold, so you double the marketing budget for the novel so you get a return on investment and then you get a relationship with the public schools. Is the reason that the novel is so dominant in American culture about its aesthetic superiority or is it something that is purely a mechanical function of capitalism and how it’s produced as a physical object and put into the world? That feels like a legitimate question to me. It’s not an engineering problem.
Education is broken down into this system of measures. It’s quantified, quantifiable, it’s not qualitative; everything is results driven, statistically driven. These are the motivators behind things. This is how value is arrived at: treating the human heart, the human experience as an engineering problem. There are things where concepts of industrialization and engineering concepts are applied to things to which they have no business being. It’s not even wrong! The purpose of studying the humanities in college was never to become a poet. It was never to think that you were going to pursue that from a career perspective. That was never the point of studying those things. It was about creating well-rounded people that would go into the world with a poet’s soul building a bridge, so that you’d bring truth and beauty into bridge building. But we get these identical McDonald’s that are shipped in trucks and put together like Lincoln Logs. What you look around at in the world is this soul crushing display of mediocrity. Products are engineered to fail, so that people consume more of them.
On the one hand people are talking about sustainability, but whatever gains are made in that are multiplied a million times over in waste, in exporting our environmental disasters to other countries, and then along comes AI and whatever efficiencies were built; one data center uses more electricity that is reliant in some way, shape, or form on fossil fuels than most countries. So what are we even doing anymore? And then, on top of all that, you have the whole branch of climate science that treats the atmosphere and the world as an engineering problem, as if it’s a closed system in the way that an engineering system like an engine or a motor is a truly closed system. It’s sealed off from outside influences. That is not the case with nature. Nature adapts. There are myriad forces that are completely unaccountable for how nature finds its own homeostasis, and the degree to which human beings can influence that in a large-scale way is largely negligible. When you look at the macro trends of how nature adapts over time and is unfolding in a way that we don’t know anything about, and in all likelihood, it doesn’t include us. So there’s this deeply selfish, self-centered worldview.
Even the Big Bang is really sort of a romantic story of cell division, you know, that we need for there to be a beginning of the universe in the way that there was a beginning for me. The one cell, the wholeness of the one thing broke into two, and then off you go. And the universe is expanding infinitely. And time is subsequently explained.
KE: And then what if there is no time?
AF: Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Everything is ever-present, always has been, and always will be falling in and out of form indefinitely. Under those conditions, time collapses. Time is only relative to the point of view of the observer, the subjective observer, the human being who dies. But what we think of as death is largely sentimental.
KE: This goes back to your second epigraph in Atom and Void, “sentimentality is a form of fatigue,” from Leonora Carrington.
AF: Yeah.
KE: Illusion and distorted images are thematic throughout Adam and Void. Do you feel that poems get you closer to clarity, if this is something you even want?
AF: The poems are an attempt to harmonize with something. There’s all these modulations of the actual language that are presented in this tidy little way, but inside, it’s sort of pure chaos within the container. And there are different voices traveling through the poems, different registers of sonic texture, the texture of the ideas, the textures of meaning are moving along in an orderly way, or in a chaotic way, crashing around.
KE: You have references to Jung’s Parsifal, too. I was wondering about your feelings on the subconscious or the unconscious—about their existence.
AF: I’ve experienced the process of unleashing it and unearthing subconsciousness. The twelve steps are basically like a recipe for confronting the unconscious and bringing it out into the light. The old timers in recovery will say that you’re only as sick as your secrets. And there are all these things that I drank down, buried, and tried to hide or ignore.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And when I put alcohol down, I had all these other choices that I could be making. So I didn’t have to think about drinking. I was making the infinite number of other choices that I had available to me by making the one choice to stay away from that. It’s embarrassingly simple. You can’t get drunk if you don’t drink. Which sounds like rocket science to an alcoholic.
KE: I think one of the weird things about being a human is the fact that we are just so infinitely complicated and also so impossibly simple and it’s strange living within that dialectic. Did poetry lead to your sobriety?
AF: I had a friend that I got sober with at Syracuse and we used to talk about relating that to poetry, that poetry aspires to the condition of prayer. I don’t know how much I still subscribe to that idea so much, but I think that there is some truth to that. Writing poetry for me is kind of a sandbox to explore this relationship with a higher power, whatever that is. My conception is no conception. I don’t write poems to reinforce my philosophies. I do it to shed them or incinerate them and see what’s left on the other side. Whatever is essential that’s left behind might be something worthwhile, worthy of attention.
KE: One of the hardest things I think about writing for me, as I write almost exclusively poetry, is I feel poetry really is about a distillation. I think what’s so beautiful about Atom and Void is that there is this repetition or echo that exists throughout the book that meditates on itself. I struggle with my own relevancy when I write, that my scope of thought is too contained, boring.
AF: I think that there’s a use and a place for boredom. You know, it’s like the John Berryman line, life, friends, is boring. There’s a lot that happens in modern life that is bone-crushingly boring and unproductive. And that is a feature, not a bug. I go out to my vehicle, I turn on the vehicle, I back out almost in the exact same way. I go down the same streets, look at the same street signs. But, like in the poem, each time they’re reintroduced, they’re not the same. That part can start to be explored, that there really is no such thing as repetition, that there really is no such thing as something being the same.
And this points back to what I was talking about with the engineering problem thing too. I work for this gear engineering magazine and an engineer will draw a gear with its perfect dimensions. But for each thing that is machined by the machine, every dimension of the object has to be assigned a tolerance, which is a plus or minus one or two microns, which would literally make a piece of hair seem gigantic. It has to be so near perfect, but no gear that is manufactured because of the temperature of the tooling, the temperature of the oil splashing onto it, the cutting tool, the speed with which it’s cutting through the steel, no two are ever going to be the same. That’s why there are tolerances. There’s no such thing as a perfect gear. There are no circles in nature. There’s always some degree of distortion in everything. There’s nothing that is the Platonic ideal of what it is in the physical world. Nothing’s round, there are no perfect triangles. And that’s just where geometry is concerned. So then you get into concepts of love and truth and beauty and things explode into even deeper subjectivities. So there, there, there is no repetition.
There are general frameworks that can be abided by in some way. It’s easy to walk through the world as if there’s some kind of certainty that can be obtained. In my experience there’s nothing more delusional and harmful than that. But it seems that’s the thing that we really suffer from the most. Why don’t you agree with me that this is beautiful? Why don’t you agree with me that this is truthful? Why would I?